


living and unliving, death and undeath

by faedemon



Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Blood Blossoms (Danny Phantom), Body Horror, Character Death, DannyMay 2020 (Danny Phantom), Death, Drabble, Drabble Collection, Gen, Ice Powers, Identity Issues, POV Danny Fenton, Poison, References to Depression, Secret Identity, Space/Stars Motif, Unreliable Narrator, What-If, the dannymay is referring to chapter 4, these are drabbles so dont expect much in the way of word count
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-26
Updated: 2020-05-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:34:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22909453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faedemon/pseuds/faedemon
Summary: He tries to smile, eyes locked unceasingly on the night. He tries to invite Orion to grab him away. He tries to implore the great void to scoop him from his place here on Earth, caught between living and unliving, death and undeath.Nothing happens. No help comes.A drabble collection from Danny's point of view.
Relationships: Danny Fenton & Maddie Fenton
Comments: 25
Kudos: 47





	1. as orion watches

**Author's Note:**

> this fic is cross-posted on FFN and can be found [here](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13576098/1/living-and-unliving-death-and-undeath).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How a confrontation between Danny and his mother, pre-reveal, might go down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this drabble is one of two that i wrote years ago! it's rewritten entirely, and consequently heavily edited, but the concept is the same.

Lying there, cast rough against the pavement, feeling scrapes burn on his back, rubbing up against the inside of his suit, Danny looks up.

Above him, the night sky seems to throw itself through his vision with abandon, the stars spinning, leaving dizzy, fading trails behind them as they go. His head pounds. Cool, almost-winter air settles on his face, and he stays very still as he waits for the world to stop careening.

Slowly, the throbbing in his head subsides, and the stars wind down until they’re still against the black void. A ways away, he hears a familiar whine, and short, tentative footsteps. He can afford to ignore them for now.

As he gazes upward, Orion glares down at his prone form, the three lights of his belt burning a lonely trail into his eyes. He can’t seem to focus enough to recognize any other constellations, just the one, lone warrior, silhouetted against the black, a striking portrait. He imagines, fleetingly, a bright hand reaching down to him, plucking him from the asphalt, stealing him away to places unknown.

It’s a tempting fantasy, if just that.

Seeing that he’s made no move to get up, the footsteps approach him, more confidence in their gait. Her gait, he should say. He knows who it is before she leans into his vision, obscuring some of his view of the sky. Childishly, he wants to push her down, out of the way. He wants the entire expanse of the night in his view. He doesn’t want to watch her movements match their sounds: the whine of an ectogun powering up, the squeak of a hazmat-clad arm raising. The bright, poisonous green of power gathering in the barrel.

He tries to smile, eyes locked unceasingly on the night. He tries to invite Orion to grab him away. He tries to implore the great void to scoop him from his place here on Earth, caught between living and unliving, death and undeath.

Nothing happens. No help comes.

His mother stands above him, looking down on him with, for once, her goggles pulled up. Unwittingly, he meets her eyes, and she gazes at him confidently (lovingly?). He is no threat to her now.

“M—” Danny tries. He chokes on blood (ectoplasm).

“Shh,” Maddie says. “I’ve studied you this long. I know how to help you now, Phantom.” She smiles, somehow.

“M—Mo—”

“Shh,” she says again, and presses the barrel of the ectogun to his forehead. And pulls.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> leave a comment if you liked this one! i really like this concept, actually, that maddie might tilt her views on ghosts a tad and try to end their "suffering" compassionately.


	2. inside eating you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A partial study of the likelihood of Danny being depressed, and of his ice powers (what he can do with them, and how he controls them).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this drabble is the second that i wrote years ago and posted to tumblr. this is also rewritten and, consequently, heavily edited, but the concept is the same. :)

It’s a particular kind of ache that Danny feels, floating there in the air just above the grass of the park. It’s the kind that can allow someone to remain alone, unmoving, for hours upon days at a time. It’s a bone-deep something, an exhaustion incurable. It has been rising in Danny for years and now spills out around him, leaving him motionless in the air despite the slight wind, even his hair frozen still.

It starts to snow. Or, he thinks it does—maybe he makes it snow, his core icy in his chest, seeming to spread out into his arms, his legs, his fingertips. His whole body both is and isn’t numb. It’s a strange dichotomy; the human in him is freezing, joints slowly locking up. The ghost in him wants to surround itself with ice. Make Amity Park a twin of the Far Frozen.

All his warring instincts feel apart from him, somehow. Rather than let them rise to his conscious attention, he focuses on the soft weight of snow on his lashes, the way it settles in his hair, on his shoulders, in the dip of his collarbones. He has no body heat like this, so it doesn’t melt when it makes contact. It builds and builds and he lets it, feeling like a hill on a moor in winter, still as the storm rages on.

Not that this is a storm. The wind has died down, and snow falls around him in utter silence.

After a long while, long enough for the faint green of the park grass to disappear beneath white, Danny moves, just a little. He reaches up to cup his hands, opening them to the snowfall. And he tilts his head just slightly back, raising his gaze to the heavens.

It’s night. It has been night as long as he’s been out here, which means only a few hours must have passed, no matter how it feels like eternity. His eyes, faintly glowing, are the only source of light, and he catches the snow that falls above his head in their dim spotlight. Past that short threshold, he can see nothing of the sky above him but blackness. He can’t see the clouds.

Maybe there aren’t clouds. Maybe he conjures every flake from the chilly air around him, instinctual, creating the only source of comfort he can find.

He can’t see the stars. Maybe that means there are clouds, really.

He doesn’t notice when the ice in his core seems to take on new reality in his chest, a weight, a physical burning. He’s too far into his own head, too far into thoughts of _ghost_ and _human_ and _boy _and _freak_.__

__It spreads out from his center, a creeping, chilling thing, and—subconsciously or not—he lets it._ _

__It’s that same thing that had eaten him when his ice first manifested: a lack of control, though this time, freely given up. Danny releases the reins, lets go of the wheel. He lets it consume him._ _

__The floating, perfect ice sculpture in the park is, come morning, thought to be an anonymous tribute to their hero for a good few weeks. It’s only when it gets warm and the ice doesn’t melt (and when Danny Phantom stops showing up to save the day, and when Danny Fenton doesn’t come home) that Amity gets the hint._ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading! leave a comment if you liked it. not sure if i even like this one, to be honest. whoops


	3. given a route

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Death creeps in, given a route.
> 
> A headcanon regarding how being half-ghost affects the human body.

It’s a curious thing, what death does to a body.

Not true decomposition—Danny hasn’t cared to look up that kind of thing; being dead doesn’t automatically mean his stomach is any stronger than it was in life. But he can see, when he looks in the mirror, sometimes, echoes of Phantom.

It’s not obvious. It’s the sort of thing only he notices, because it’s his body, and _oh, that’s new_. And, also, it might literally be only something he can see, gaze deathless.

Vlad has it too. It’s… there’s a translucency, to both of them, a sort of flickering quality that shouldn’t be possible for flesh and bone but is. None of the living acknowledge or seem to see it, but there’s something insubstantial to their very essences. Death creeps in, given a route, and here is the decay.

He thinks that, given long enough, his human body might just fade away, Phantom in its place.

He doesn’t know how to feel about that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lmk what you think/your thoughts on this headcanon !!


	4. smell the roses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On what it must feel like for poison to kill you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chap doubles as an entry for DannyMay 2020! today is day 2, the daily theme _flowers_

There is nothing so insidious as the way something can kill you from the inside out.

Blood blossoms are beautiful; Danny can’t deny that. Their petals like roses and stems a dark, enticing black make for a gothic, lovely visage, and Sam has talked more than once about how nice they would look in her garden, if only Danny weren’t “allergic.” He doesn’t blame her—they _are_ pretty. There has never been a more beautiful death.

It sticks to the inside of his throat, that sick-sweet scent. It coats his mouth like a film, and it clogs his lungs like mud from a dust storm. It eats at him, acidic, until his tongue is burning, his skin, his breath. It is a slow death, and one might think that for someone dead already, a second undoing is nothing—

but Danny is a child yet, and he may know what lies beyond mortality, but no ghost has ever been able to send back tales of what comes after they go for good.

So he chokes, afraid, on the scent of a killing thing, growing so innocently in the brush and yet untouchable to him. He collapses into them, and the thorns pierce his suit, his skin, and it is like puncturing a balloon, for how easily they go through. And he hurts.

And the poison seeps in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i just find it interesting how danny didn't have to eat the flowers, or be pierced by them, for it to hurt. he only had to smell them.


End file.
